The Great Rite Of Renewal

Part Two: And Where The Village?

SECOND VULNERABILITY

And someone said to me:

Jesus’s greatest temptation may have been to not come back from the desert.

It chimed with a thought that was in my head years and years ago.

The wild’s not the problem, it’s the return.

The edges remain the edges and can still be experienced. That thing they do can still be encountered. These experiences require contemplation, but coming back does too. Even caution. The potential disconnect between desert and village could scrub out the marginal encounter as the price of admission back to what-we-knew-before. But what we-knew-before is not what we’re after.

You can have a sacred experience out in the bush, but the second vulnerability is quite what to do with it on the return.

I go to the desert to make sure I’m in touch with the Encounter, not just my carefully curated thoughts about the encounter.

So desert to the village. How do we keep the useful tension between them?

One thought about a village is that in ancient Ireland monasteries grew so large they could be considered villages themselves. There needed to be trees to grow fruit, bee keeping, farm management, schooling, even writing rooms. This is a long way from what Brendan Lehane would call, “Scrawny and impotent worshippers of a far-removed-god.” There’s a lot to be inspired by. That a certain kind of village always had more than an eye for the Interior Mountain. The intentional community I guess is a modern phrase.

I am aware when I write about the village it could seem an unreal, or quaint location. Many of us are in towns or cities or suburbs. So this is less about a physical village and more a word to describe your immediate people, animals and general setting: the intimate ties with folk you bang through life with. The reasonably settled. Those you return to.

So when it comes to such a village, I want to suggest things that could keep such a place receptive to the desert. Any scholar of Russian theology would be able to query elements in the following descriptions, but I’m going to present them anyway. And I would caution that such characters risk idealisation, so I would ask to simply get the general gist and contemplate what they could look like in our lives today. There’s always a shadowy version of every role or personality. Cleave to the good.

GREAT REMEMBERERS

How do we avoid desert experience calcifying into a village platitude?

We may need a Spiritual Fool around. We may need a Genial Wanderer.

A wanderer in a village? That may seem odd in the notion of a settlement, but I’d argue there needs to be space for such arrivals. They provide appropriate religious disruption.